Bad Boys 4 adds Ioan Gruffudd to the cast during principle photography

One of the teases unveiled at CinemaCon this week during the Sony panel is the follow-up to the successful third entry in the Martin Lawrence-Will Smith buddy cop action comedy Bad Boys. Bad Boys for Life became 2020’s most successful movie when it got its release at the start of the year before COVID would shut down theaters for some time. Even without the pandemic, the film likely would have raked in the cash due to the popularity of the first two films.

According to Deadline, Ioan Gruffudd, known for his turn as Reed Richards in 2005’s Fantastic Four, has now joined the cast. It has been reported that Gruffudd will be playing a character named Lockwood, who is a high-profile attorney running for an election. The plot is being kept under wraps; however, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence would make an appearance at the Sony panel via a pre-recorded video saying that they are currently in their fourth week of filming. The duo recorded it on-location in Miami, where all the movies in the trilogy have taken place.

Sony has brought back the directing partners, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, to helm this release after their work on Bad Boys for Life, which they took over from Michael Bay. Arbi and Fallah are also known to have recently directed the notoriously scrapped superhero movie, Batgirl at Warner Bros before the regime change. They also worked together on the script for Bad Boys 4 along with Chris Bremner. Paola Núnez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Alexander Ludwig have been announced that they would be reprising their roles from the previous entry. And Eric Dane was previously announced to play the film’s villain.

For as long as it took a third to get made after the success of the second, the fourth was put in motion rather quickly. Although it was already planned to expand the franchise further, especially with the set-up of Mike Lowery’s son being recruited for police work, Sony jumped on the project after the box office numbers of the last film, and it would seem that Smith is eager to rebound his career after an infamous incident that some people may have heard of that happened at an awards show.